Monday, March 23, 2009

That was really a great zoo, I highly recommend it to anyone in the area. One thing I didn't get on video was my favorite exhibit out of them all, the manatees. We were going through the exhibit, and there were a lot of little aquariums, then we walked into a room with a big one over to the side. I thought it was just a big aquarium to mimic like a river bed or something, then all of a sudden, a manatee swam over from the other side. It was HUGE. I'd never seen one up so close before, and it was really beautiful.

Another thing I wish I had gotten on video was the polar bear exhibit. There were three of them, one was swimming, and the other two were on land just wandering around. The swimming one was funny, he would go from the deep end of the pool to the shallow end, then flip over and swim on his back out to where he had come from. He would use his paw to push himself off the rocks that were sticking out into the water from the side of the pool. Then we moved along down to the next section of the exhibit, just in time to see one of the other polar bears back up to the edge of the rocks and let go a #2. I'm -glad- I didn't get that part on video!

There were some other cats there who were just adorable. One in the nocturnal house had his own little hammock bed, and he was laying in there just like our cat at home does, staring lazily out at the people walking by. In the cat house with the Pallas cat (which -is- in the video), there was one cat who looked just like a kitten, but that was as big as he was going to get. He looked much too adorable to be a fierce predator!

One of the last things we saw was the insect house. That's something I could have done without. I'm not a fan of spiders, and of course there were tarantulas and scorpions in there, but the creepiest ones were the big ones. Bugs should NOT be allowed to get that big, seriously. The walking stick bugs were kind of cool, and some of the beetles were really pretty, but other ones.. oog. In other cases, it wasn't the size of the bugs themselves that creeped me out, but how many bugs were in one tiny exhibit. It gives me the creeps just thinking about it.